you usually make an open fire, but sometimes you need a stove?
you don't want to carry something heavy or something that uses weird fuel that you can't get everywhere?

alcohol stoves are great in general, and this one in particular: vargo decagon

It was a bit slow to prime (should get to a certain temperature before it starts shooting flames from the sides) but I deal with this by just covering the whole thing with alcohol setting it on fire, primes it immediately :D

(if you get a vargo triad, you should have an alcohol bottle with about 1mm nozle, it has just a tiny hole to fill it through)

you can also always make a DIY super cat or something on the cheap, and you should use a windscreen, these can be sensitive to wind. yes putting random stuff around is fine-ish, but those aluminum foldable ones are reliable, cheap and light.

Needed some usual things for internet operations these days like system monitoring, smart logging, graphing and alerting, high availiability, cloud, ids/ips, and mucho security.

Did this many times for random projects but this one was more serious and so I decided to rethink everything with focus on the security infrastructure.
Manuals were read and quite a few quick projects were made and there is more to come so this post will be updated with time.
I'll quickly go through the novel things I implemented and novel thoughs I have on the subject. This post will be a mess and there is a lot to write,

Quick logistics for nodejs apps

this is boring and already exists but I like the way I do things.

lego is a node app plugin system, works by looking for node_modules modules with certain prefix, supports dependency trees and a central config file.

System monitoring?

munin is a collection of perl? scripts from '98 ran by crontab. UGH. nagios is.. yeah, same thing.

went with logstash -> elasticsearch -> kibana for data collection/graphing and riemann for alerting. Didn't figure out active system checks yet (a job for nagios usually. stuff like pinging, checking if websites render correctly, potentially crawling them and such)

all kinds of apps write to logstash. my node apps, log data collectors (lumberjack), local system checks IDS, and such, it works well. Data from everywhere is aggregated and graphed together. I've written something simmilar to this stack as one off apps for debugging complex architecture a bunchoftimes, was very happy to find out that someone actually already works on such a thing pretty seriously.

didn't like collectd as it seemed like something that hangs out in a munin/nagios oldies crowd. so I wrote:

a simple probe that collects data from machines locally and sends it to a central server (in my case logstash) via udp json.

Geographical internet stuff

csi-internet is there for you if you want to draw some computer stuff on a map. Also good to impress your girlfriend if she got used to cmatrix. As a test of a graphing engine it can ping around, do traceroutes and draw heatmaps. Messy atm as looking at pictures was more fun then looking at good code. work in progress. works on top of d3 and datamaps.

Firewalls

Writing tons of iptables rules is for robots and not humans and so I'd fuck it up eventually.
pyromaniac is a thing that renders JSON into iptables commands.

this program is highly specific to my scenario (machines behind a NAT hypervisor with strict control of each connection) I'm showing an aproach here more then sharing my code as something that will work for you.

IDS/IPS

I really like this part, but will write it up later when I have more to show

Quick review of Yuneec e-go cruiser as there aren't that many of those around. I'll try to mention things I was wondering and wasn't able to find out about online. I'm also lazy, so not that many links in this text, use google.

This is a chepaest longboard of a new generation (lipo batteries, sub 10kg) with also one of the best specs.

Weight

6 kg, one of the lightest boards around, until marbel comes out and changes the playing field.

Range

Official site claims 30km range. My experience in the real world is closer to 10km.

Speedo

I'm a dumb kid, I like going fast, and top speed of this board is 20 km/h which seemed slow, but its not. Longboard is not a bicycle, small obstacles would become too dangerous at higher speeds. In order to safely achieve higher speeds in city like environments wheels would have to be at least two times bigger, and then this wouldn't be a typical longboard anymore and it wouldn't be light.

Misc

The board is not totally quiet but the noise is nothing too much, some people might even enjoy it.

I don't feel comfortable climbing up sidewalk borders higher then ~5 cm, not sure if it's the lack of experience or just not the thing you would normally do with a 6kg longboard.

Its not waterproof. It will handle some splashing but it happened a few times that I couldn't turn it off before it dried.
Its easy to entirely disassemble and assemble, you even get the tool for it with the board.

Hacking

Yuneec is not friendly about it. I asked. But I'm guessing the board itself would be pretty friendly. Speed could be changed in order to kill myself more easily, I'm light, I'm pretty sure it could go faster then it does, I could for example just change the transmission, or perhaps replace the firmware or the speed controler entirely. And regarding the remote controler, the board supports bluetooth connection to iphone, this could be reversed and a custom controler could be made, for example just a glove which measures how bent your fingers are.

Customer Support

Great, if you talk to European branch. Asian branch is slow to respond if they respond, with bad english. After a week my wheel randomly fell off, the bearing broke. These are good longboard bearings and they said they've never seen this happen before, in a few days I've received a whole new set of wheels.

Conclusion

I never skateboarded but got a hang of it pretty quickly regardless of my awful computer programmer leg coordination. Had it for about a month. The better I get the more fun I have, and I keep thinking how "I could be skating right now". There is like 10% of the people that go insane when they try it and they seem to be ready to sell their soul to satan to get one.

It does perfectly what it intends to do, it's called a cruiser and its a great product for fun commuting.

It turned out that I really like this technology and I'll get a Evolve carbon board which seems to be the best board I can buy right now, its heavier, with big wheels and costs as much as a car so its definetely not for everyone, but putting it out there also. Marbel board looks like an e-go killer, but its not out yet.

When buying, I've made this quick table, haven't found comparisons like this online surprisingly, so I'll share this too.

boardspeedrangeweightprice

marbel 40kmh 20km 4.4kg 1299 usd

e-go 20kmh 30km 6.3kg 750 usd

bamboo 38kmh 30km 8kg 1240 usd

bamboo terrain 35kmh 15km 10kg

carbom street 38kmh 40km 8.5kg 1700 usd

carbon terrain 35kmh 25km 10.5kg 2000 usd

boosted 32-35kmh 10km 6-7kg 1300 usd

z-board pro 32kmh 20km 11kg 750 usd

Long Term

Owned the board for about 4 months now. I've had a lot of hardware issues. Luckily, the support is very good.
Drive wheel fell off - bearing broke, they sent me new wheels. Then, the whole board randomly died, shipped it to them, they fixed it, it randomly died again a week later in a slightly different way, shipped it again, waiting to get it back. deliveries in eu are fast (3-4 days one way) but still, the whole process takes at least 10ish days when there is an issue like this. I think 25% of the time I've owned the board, I couldn't use it.

I also met another person which owned a board for much longer then me, treats it badly, and have had 0 issues.

these might be used in combination with some simple IR or just cameras (need more CPU but could double as optical flow sensors) used to locate becaons for landing or grabbing things

Ideally, both sensors should have an unobstructed front view on pitch dimension, with aditional unobstructed jaw dimension for LIDAR.
Both sensors need to be able to independantly rotate on pitch axis for compensation of the angle of the drone when flying, and for scanning up and down (going in through windows, looking down when landing, etc) maybe rangefinder should also rotate on jaw axis on some fast servos for looking around independant of the drone orientation. not sure yet.

--

IR and ultrasound were also options, they are cheap but tricky and unreliable, (ultrasound behaves extra badly due to propeller noise on drones)
These things can be compensated for, but laser rangefinding will always afaik give more accuracy and reliability at a price.

people often ask me why I own a drone, what is it for, and then half of the time they say that I could use it to record weddings and get some cash flowin'

If mention of recording weddings doesn't kill all my will for conversation, I'll say drones are so simple to make these days that I find it hard to justify not owning one.
also, at the time there is no regulation and no one ever counts on you owning a flying robot, so its a sweet spot to own one.
a drone is a flying sidekick, it can, in theory, do whatever a flying sidekick can do. it can enter through windows and steal jewlery with its tiny robot hands. Sounds ridicilous but technically it is not hard to do. In the following years we'll have to rethink space and what can be done, and before that happens, I get to be a kind of a superhero.

today, drones are very primitive. I'll fix some parts that I care about. and if I make anything useful, Im guessing drone related kickstarter projects would be welcome.

a few ideas,

work on being more autonomus, gesture recognition, landing on backpack, automatic charging, simple commands like follow me, land and observe, and such

picking up bread in the morning

ground locomotion, wheels or legs!

stringing a rope somewhere high or for a tyrolean traverse - I can be a very slow batman and I always wanted to string a hammock up between two buildings.

guarding a camp spot and scarring bears away

looking for people

planting and picking up sensors

security? (I'm terrified of security robots working against me, I'm excited about security robots working for me - maybe I won't touch this.)

obvious things like scouting or mapping, it would be nice to have something that creates a google maps or openstreetmap layer as it flyes around, and it shouldn't be too hard to implement, in theory :)

few concrete things to work on, sorted by priority

integrate a real computer (starting with beaglebone in my case, will need to reverse and implement sbus and naza CAN bus protocols)

long range modem - something like xbee xtend and/or sim cards for control over gsm

async object or json pattern matching/validation used for validating function/process arguments, api call permissions, messages, etc. supports serialization/deserialization of patterns themselves, which I used to implement a generic db query language on top of this. for now, tests are documentation

After looking at the rorschach test, I wanted more.
supirisingly, I couldn't find any rorschach generators online,
so, python, tkinter and randomwalk with random size blobs and simmetrical reflection,
I thought that some tweaking or more complicated algorithm would be needed but this works great.

a bunch of selfish prisoners having sex and mutating. WHOA. a very basic evolutionary algorithm, a last night's play.

Prisoner's dilemma is a scenario in a game theory (check it out if you don't know about it)
its interesting to me in part because it explains human moral intuitions through a selfish evolutionary perspective, in other words, why people are generally nice to each other.

In the iterated prisoners dilemma the game is played repeatedly thus each agent has an opportunity to learn about other agents behaviours and potentially punish noncooperation.
Cooperation may then arise as an equilibrium outcome.

solutions:

I didn't get tit for tat which I originaly expected,
nor did I manage to get any other cooperative equilibrium. cooperation does evolve, but it doesn't last,
strange, I expected that cooperative species will raise and stay dominant as I enlarge the number of
interactions before a step in the evolution. (its rational to be nice if you need to stick around) need to investigate and think about this some more.

I'll post more info and code later or never.
screenshot and someone with a different approach and a spacial dimension.

random things, my laptop is using it to watch and react to system wide events, like lid being closed or connection to the internet being established, my cellphone is running it in order to connect and sync with my computers and it is what I use to control lights in my appartment or display data from remote servers on my desktop

I've been hoping to write this for a while, its not a very exciting project so I've been working on this when I'm tired.

its a bit unusual, nodejs-blosxom, ~400 lines of coffescript. this is very much a work in progress, I'd advise you to use it as inspiration more then as a code you run. templates related to my own homepage are included in the repo. might move them laters.

features

each post is a markdown file (maybe I should check out ORG mode files?)

posts are in a git repo, so they can be written offline and synced with the web later

I wanted something like google plus circles, with restricted tags for particular people

implicit tagging by placement .md posts in folders

explicit tagging/metadata for a particular post by adding a JSON line as a first line in a file

tag filtering

no javascript on the clientside

rss for arbitrary tag combination

immediate todo

full set operations on tags

think about collapsing large posts when they are initially displayed..

also, don't render ALL matching posts, do the next/prev button thing.

saving of blog post metadata JSON back to files

color private tags differently

wiki (some way to link to other posts or tags (just extend the markdown?))